Emoji—Trendy Slang or a Whole New Language?

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Emoji—Trendy Slang or a Whole New Language?

WIRED

Oh, crap. Did you really just send that text? OK, OK, OK... just send a . Oh wait, this is that cousin? You're right, would be bad. How about ? Play it off as an honest mistake. Too candid? OK, why not ? After all, you were just joking. Seriously?! The cat thing you told me about last week was this cousin's dad? OK, fine, just use . Your family is so weird.

Digital communications have always been a little socially handicapped. Unlike the written and typed communiques that came before, digital mixes immediacy with intimacy in a way that strips nuance and drains context. But emoji are more than emotional punctuation. They add context, enable wordplay, insert nuance, and let you speak your mind while taking the edge off your message. They're tone-of-voice for a medium that has no tone and no voice.

They might also be changing written English. No, not changing in a way that means the language is abandoning the alphabet and regressing back to ideograms—simple glyphs, symbols, and pictures. Languages change all the time, and that's OK. It's evolution. The question is whether emoji will ride their cultural appeal long enough to become a discrete, complete means of communication. Or emoji might be a lexical fad, here for now but gone as soon as this wave of digital natives hands control of the global village over to the next generation.

Emoji means picture (e) character (moji). It's a Japanese portmanteau, but it sounds like an American onomatopoeia. Docomo, a Japanese telecoms giant, invented emoji in the 1990s to sweeten their countrymen to texting. Spoken, written, lived Japanese is rich with context, honorifics, and layers of meaning. Perhaps more than anybody speaking English or a European language could imagine, Japan needed some way to indicate the tone of a text.

Of course, emoji weren't the first attempt to add an emotional layer. Before emoji there were kaomoji—those looked kinda like this: ╮(￣～￣)╭, (o_O), and (=｀ω´=). And before that there were emoticons :-). Both were created to add emotional context. Cute and creative, but those older forms require a lot of typing, which on phones means tapping, which in the 1990s meant pecking at numeral buttons. By creating a standardized Unicode library of images, emoji took the finger work out of typing context into your texts.

But it would be pretty narrow to think of emoji as just emotional punctuation. Emoji are clever, are puns, are art, are jokes about art, are games, are songs, are stories. So when you think about them that way, they start to seem like a language.

But emoji aren't a language. At least, not yet. They're more like an embryonic language, a cluster of cells that might be a language some day. The closest linguistic analogue might be a pidgin. "A pidgin is a new language created when people who have two languages come together," says Susan Herring, a linguist at Indiana University who has been studying the way people talk on the Internet since 1990. Pidgins are typically created out of extreme necessity—they are trade languages, slave languages, refugee languages. Emoji, though, are mostly fun. And the users typically come from the same linguistic background. So not quite a pidgin, but still some of the linguistic structural constraints might still be relevant.

"In a pidgin, you have nouns and verbs and not very much grammar," says Herring. Pidgins are article-deficient, conjunction-deprived, and prepositionally challenged. They are used only in the present tense, and rarely accommodate personal pronouns. Pidgins are downright hostile to plurals.

Emoji have the same limitations. When was the last time you used emoji to discuss a past or future event when it wasn't in response to a question? Have you ever used emoji to talk about a third party without first teeing up that personal pronoun with boring old letters? And if you're talking about a crowd of people, the only way to pluralize is by tap-tap-tapping a bunch of little faces. Not to mention all the little linking words that we take for granted but give English the power to identify, modify, and look at things far away in space and time. Words like: "the," "in," "around," "into," "apart from," "beside," "by," "as," and "instead."

These aspects only come along if a pidgin is passed along to another generation. This is when a pidgin becomes a creole. Creoles have tense, nuance, and grammar. The fact that creoles develop these tells us two things:1. Languages are emergent.2. Children evolve languages.

But nobody is going to learn emoji as their first language. So even though emoji can answer questions, modify sentences, and give punch lines, they are closer to slang than anything else. And like creoles and slang, the most creative users of emoji are the youth. Emoji may seem like a new language (and an ideographic one at that) to people who don't use them natively. "Adolescents are the real movers and shakers in linguistic change," says Penelope Eckert, a linguist at Stanford University. "They are the ones who lead in the terms of dialectic difference and ultimately language difference. You got the romance languages by people speaking language differently. Same goes for regional dialects and ethnic dialects. It’s the process of social differentiation. Teenagers are much busier in that process than older people."

Adolescent linguistic fads percolate out in a few ways. One, the people who used the lingo grow up. Two, older people catch on. Young people are the disease vectors in linguistic memes.

Which is how emoji might die. Think about "groovy." Think about "tubular." Think about "wazzzzzzzuuuuup," or Snoop Dogg's -izzle slang, or people yelling "Yeah Baby!" at each other in fake British accents. Think about when the Oxford English Dictionary added "bling." Think about the first time your mom called something "the bomb." Think about the dork you saw at the mall in a trollface shirt. Think about emoji's long term fate while also thinking about the all-emoji press release Chevrolet proudly shared on Monday.

On the other hand, think about cool, whatever, chillin', hanging out. Think about all the ways you use the word 'like' every single day. Think about the fact that hip hop survived some of the worst possiblecorporate co-opting in the 1990s. Consider emoji in the context of all the other linguistic innovations people owe to digital communication—not just emoticons and kaomoji, but netspeak, lolspeak, dogespeak, 13375p3ak, reaction gifs, memes, lol, brb, jk. "It's possible that emoji, like other Internet languages, will get absorbed into regular online writing," says Herring. Humans love language, and we love playing with language, and any time we find a new method of communicating we are going to play and experiment with it. At least for a while. The fate of emoji is the same as the fate of English: ¯＼_(ツ)_/¯.